This project explored how textbooks and other school-based educational media are produced in contexts of globalization. The descriptive question was: How are decisions made about what is worth knowing or remembering (here and now)? The analytical question was: What does this tell us about the stabilization and destabilization of hegemonic formations.

The theoretical frame for the project is recent developments in discourse theory and memory studies. In order to engage with the dynamics of discourse and memory, an ethnographic approach was adopted. From 2009 to 2011 Felicitas Macgilchrist followed the production of a range of “educational media products” for secondary level History and Politics.

Where much research on discourse and memory has to date focused primarily on the stabilization of hegemonic formations (e.g. national identities, neoliberalism, images of the other), an ethnographic discourse analysis enables the identification of moments of destabilization, i.e. fissures and gaps in these formations. In the project, conflicts were observed over, for instance, the representation of postcolonial world history, Poland in today’s Europe, the roots of democracy, socialism during the 1918/19 revolution, and pre-colonial Africa.

In these moments of destabilization, potentials for future political change become visible. In this sense, educational media (texts) are not only an indication of “consensus knowledge” but also of which contradictory knowledges are currently struggling for hegemony.

The project was completed in 2012. A follow-up project, running from 2013 to 2016, explores the use of these materials in today’s schools: Memory Practices: Enacting and contesting the curriculum in contemporary classrooms.

In 2016 Felicitas Macgilchrist completed her “habilitation” at the Technical University Braunschweig with a written submission based on this research project. The title was “Textbook Production: The entangled practices of developing curricular materials for schools”.